The present application relates to software and more specifically to software and accompanying systems and methods for facilitating detecting, diagnosing, and/or analyzing software errors, such as bugs.
Systems and methods for facilitating troubleshooting and resolving software errors are employed in various demanding applications, including programming language compilers and accompanying code debuggers, web server performance analysis tools, and so on. Such applications demand accurate and informative methods for detecting and characterizing software errors to facilitate resolution.
Effective and informative tools for diagnosing software errors are particularly important for diagnosing errors and related problems occurring in complex systems, such as large Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), where software error information may be incomplete and dispersed among multiple systems. For example, in certain SOA computing environments, a given web application may call many web services, and the exact web service that triggered the software error can be difficult to ascertain.
Conventionally, when a software error is encountered by an end user or software proprietor, the end user and/or proprietor may contact each other to discuss the user's activity when the software error occurred. However, the user may not recall exactly what they were doing when a particular error occurred.
Furthermore, verbally describing a software error can be time consuming, inaccurate, and inefficient. Important details may be forgotten before the user speaks with customer support personnel (e.g., the software proprietor). Furthermore, the user may be unaware of exactly what the user did that resulted in the error.
Alternatively, certain software applications include functionality for automatically presenting a dialog box when an error occurs. The dialog box may provide one or more fields for accepting user descriptions of the error and accompanying circumstances. However, such features often do not yield sufficient information to enable efficient error diagnosis and correction.
In general, industry solutions provide insufficient information to enable efficient software error diagnosis and resolution, especially in complex computing environments. Furthermore, existing solutions are often characterized by a collection of disparate tools, which may further complicate software error diagnosis and resolution.